Kimberly Williams Crenshaw

So sorry, Emma DeGraff and Reed, we can't help you here.

And it just blew my mind.

How can these very smart people not get that if you're protected against race discrimination, you're protected against all of it?

So I turn to a metaphor basically to say, you judges go through intersections all the time.

You're never on one course or another.

So in the same way that traffic going north and south sometimes overlaps with traffic going east to west,

Discrimination on the basis of race sometimes overlaps with discrimination on the basis of gender.

The law should provide a protection for that kind of discrimination.

So that's where intersectionality came from.

Infuriating, of course.

You know, these ideas have been around for decades before they were discovered and weaponized into the moral panic of the moment.

Critical race theory is simply the idea that racial power is not always expressed in explicit racist terms, but is and has been embedded in many of our institutions, especially in the law.

Yes.

Well, here's the thing.

They're using critical race theory as the subject line for everything that has to do with race.

So now that they have successfully said, if you're learning about the Tulsa massacre, that's critical race theory.

If you are learning about the way that the Constitution embedded enslavement in it, despite the fact that slavery as a word never appears, that's critical race theory.

If you talk about the Montgomery bus boycott...

and you talk about segregation as an anti-Black policy and practice, that is critical race theory.

So effectively, what they are trying to do with critical race theory is to say that any mention of race that talks about racial disempowerment, that talks about